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Friday, July 22, 2011

When All Else Fails, Hire a Sports Team

It must be a tough job being a circumcision promoter... You're paid to convince a quota of men to have part of their penises cut off "for their own good," and for whatever "mysterious" reason, only a small fraction of the men you're expected to convince trickle in. You've tried music, you've tried, movies, you've tried coercion, you've tried harassment, you've tried taunting their masculinity, and nothing seems to work! You've got a quota that a paycheck from PEPFAR or Bill Gates depends on, the year is almost over and you've barely got a tenth of your goal. What to do? Hire a football team!

Nothing is more effective in brainwashing people, er, I mean properly educating them about HIV transmission and the full range of their options than celebrity endorsement. The celebrity isn't even required to be an actual user of the product advertised, just as long as their name and face is on it is enough. PEPFAR and Bill Gates say they'll flip the bill so it's all covered. The men should be jumping in line to have part of their penises cut off! If they don't, if all else fails, you can always re-launch your campaign and get the king to endorse it. After all, what's more influential than a king nobody really listens to?

Yes, it looks like the ministry of health in Botswana has taken the lead of Swaziland's ministry of health and they have finally gotten their own football team to endorse their very own campaign. It was very recently reported that men in Botswana were "mysteriously" not taking the circumcision bait, and that they were 88% behind in their quota. If this fails, Botswana's ministry of health's next move would be to hire a local king. (If they can find one that is influential and leads by example; the Swazi king has many wives and is not even circumcised himself!)

What I'd like to know is how many of the athletes that are endorsing this campaign actually went through with their circumcisions. It's very easy to to lie for money. Celebrities endorse products they never use all the time. The Swazi king has endorsed circumcision, but he has yet to announce his own. The story in Mmegi's latest article almost sounds believable, except for the part about the operation taking 5 minutes. Is this story even true? Or was his athlete paid to lie? It would be interesting to ask for these men to drop their pants to see if they're lying or not. There's not a doubt in my mind that some of the very organizers of these so-called "mass circumcision campaigns" would never put their money where their penises are.

Sooner or later the circumcision/HIV hoax will blow over. These so-called "studies" are going to explode into the scientific scandal of the century, and the WHO, UNAIDS, PEPFAR, Bill Gates etc., will all have to bear responsibility for bankrolling miseducation campaigns, and the genital mutilation of thousands of men and children across Africa in the name of "humanitarian aid."